The art world likes its “isms”: Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism, to name a few in the 20th century. But after a brief flirtation with Neo-Geoism in the 1980s, “isms” seemed to evaporate. Until now. Without noticing it, we’re in Globalism. And the shows this spring more than bear that out. Ten shows I’m looking forward to are:

William Kentridge’s “Triumphs and Laments: A Project for Rome,” an epic frieze along the banks of Rome’s Tiber, opens on April 21 and a triumphal musical collaboration by Kentridge and the composer Philip Miller. Two musical parades will converge in a fabulous shadow play in the middle of the embankment. It will be the city’s largest public artwork, an 1,800-plus-foot processional frieze. More than 80 huge black-and-white figures and mythological creatures stenciled onto the embankment’s towering travertine walls will cover the sweep of Rome’s glorious and not-so-glorious history, from the city’s mythological beginnings to the struggles of today’s refugees. The work will last for several years, until it fades back to its original state over time.

Joe Bradley’s first show at Gagosian (uptown) opens on April 2, but he’s not leaving his original home—the wildly inventive Canada gallery. Bradley’s unique voice in painting, which he acquired while growing up in Kittery, Maine, and going to the Rhode Island School of Design (and God knows where else), hits his desired notes of being “intentionally shoddy” and “pathetic,” but there’s a lot more to it than that—powerful abstractions that never stop surprising you.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s new 10-story, Snøhetta-designed building expansion opens on May 14 with three dazzling collections: The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection (one of the best in the West), the new Pritzker Center for Photography (SFMOMA has one of the top photography collections in the world), and a collection of works acquired during SFMOMA’s just-completed Campaign for Art. The expansion nearly triples the exhibition space, giving the museum plenty of room to show 600 of the more than 3,000 works it has brought in through the Campaign. The Fisher Collection exhibition will highlight how a first-rate private collection can live within the context of a major museum—instead of becoming an isolated personal monument. As such, it’s a triumph.

“Nothingness is not nothing at all,” at the Long Museum in Shanghai, Olafur Eliasson’s first survey exhibition in a Chinese museum. China will get the full Eliasson interactive treatment with a new work, The open pyramid, that looks like it’s trying to approximate the Danish-Icelandic artist’s riotously popular 2003 The Weather Project at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. It will encourage viewers to participate, as will other installations, sculptures, paintings, and film, which include such basic stuff as water, ice, light, and stone. Mirrors, lenses, and other such optical devices will abound, playing with visual perception. (March 20–June 19)

“Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” at MoMA is an immersion into Degas’s magical and experimental monotypes. Who could forget MoMA’s brilliant show of Gauguin’s monotypes two years ago? Degas made more than 300 during his life, and almost half of them are at MoMA. These rarely seen works reveal much more about the way Degas worked, his restless desire to push all boundaries. They show his full and risky immersion into the process of printmaking, daring him to keep going further. Of course there are ballerinas and prostitutes, but it’s the radical abstract landscapes and female bathers in impossible poses that surprise. MoMA is publishing its latest children’s book, What Degas Saw by Samantha Friedman, to coincide with this show. Started by MoMA’s associate publisher Charles Kim in 2013 and based on the museum’s program and collection, the children’s series is a scintillating collaboration between curators and artists. (March 26–July 24)

“Allen Jones: A Retrospective” is the first show in New York devoted to London’s Pop painter-sculptor, a British icon who is virtually unknown to the American public. His main subject is sex, usually presented as an idealized, highly stylized female figure. His controversial female “furniture” sculptures will not be included. Another museum-like show at a gallery, in this case Michael Werner, it’s curated by the former Royal Academy stalwart Norman Rosenthal. The survey includes works from 1962 to the present, and Rosenthal has managed to borrow three striking paintings Jones made in 1965, during the year he lived and worked in New York’s Hotel Chelsea, in a room previously occupied by Larry Rivers. (March 31–May 28)

Malick Sidibé: Jack Shainman Gallery gives this master Malian photographer his sixth solo show. The black-and-white images by this iconic photographer—a young couple dancing, street scenes, and studio shots in his hometown of Bamako—since the 1950s grow in their importance and influence. Chris Ofili traveled to Mali to be photographed by Sidibé for his New Yorker profile two years ago. Sidibé’s most recent works, Vue de Dos, takes on the nude, showing women with bare backs to the camera. He’s never shown these private portraits in Mali, but you can see them at Jack Shainman through April 23.

“What About Art? Contemporary Art From China,” curated by Cai Guo-Qiang at the Qatar Museums’ Gallery Al Riwaq in Doha (through July 16), gives a look at what’s happening with Chinese art beyond Ai Weiwei and Zeng Fanzhi. Cai has chosen 14 artists and one artist-collaborative to prove the diverse creativity among these contemporary artists. He introduces names most of us don’t know, such as Liu Wei, Jennifer Wen Ma, and Xu Zhen, and asks us to look and see that there’s no one single style in the most recent Chinese art.

Spring 2016 at the Studio Museum in Harlem is a feast of exhibitions, including Rodney McMillian’s first solo show in a New York City museum; new projects by Ebony G. Patterson and Rashaad Newsome; and a show called “Palatable: Food and Contemporary Art,” about how artists use food to address everything from politics to race and culture. (Through June 26)

Maurizio Cattelan comes out of his five-year hibernation from the art world on the 24th of April, when Maura Axelrod’s film Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival. He is also showing in Frieze New York (May 5 to 8) in Cecilia Alemani’s special Projects section. And be on the lookout for other Cattelan spottings where you least expect them . . .